List more in the comments! I’ll add them if they are a community for a video game genre, and have had at least one post in the last month. Crossposted to !communitypromo here....
Communities for Talos Principle and Resident Evil, but again, they aren’t active.
Yeah, there are a bunch of communities for individual video games, but they’re all pretty dead. I think that !pixeldungeon, where the dev actually shows up, posts, and moderates is probably one of the most alive.
This came up when I originally got on the Threadiverse — I remember suggesting that people post in generic gaming communities, then when the load became too high, move to genre-specific, and then when the load became too high, move to game-specific. Otherwise, the userbase in any one community just isn’t large enough to get much community activity.
Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.
The three best games in the series were Puyo Puyo 15th Anniversary (2006), Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary (2011), and Puyo Puyo Chronicle (2016, this game is 25th in all but name). None of these games were released outside of Japan
After being defeated, Satan joins the party and promises that the way back home lies at the top of the Color Tower, and all Arle would need to do now is scale it to return home.
Hmm.
I think “Satan as a playable character” might be one of those cultural-issue things that would come up when considering localization.
I like naval warfare games, but I tend towards the sim side, not the “experience being someone there” sort.
The naval warfare game that I have played the most of recently is https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008100/Rule_the_Waves_3/. That’s definitely not an eye candy game, but it models the design and development of warships from 1880 into the Cold War, the construction of fleets, and the tactics when they meet, has a lot of flexibility to simulate different stuff.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1489630/Carrier_Command_2/. This is not a real-world oriented sim. You command an amphibious assault ship which can capture islands to gain resources, capture technology, and buy munitions, air and amphibious vehicles, and fight against another similar amphibious assault ship approaching you. I really like the untextured polygon aesthetic – they make stuff look pretty even with just that. Need to manage a ton of vehicles and aircraft and production and logistics vessels and support craft concurrently; as the game continues on, the load increases. If you’ve played https://store.steampowered.com/app/267980/Hostile_Waters_Antaeus_Rising/, sort of similar idea — both are based on Carrier Command. Not mission-oriented the way Hostile Waters is. It’s really intended to be played multiplayer, which I’ve no interest in, but you can play single-player if you can handle the load of doing all the tasks. I had a surprising amount of fun banging away with this one. I really think that this game would have benefited from some rebalancing and further development — some gear just isn’t all that useful, and I think that the game would make a magnificent base for a more-sophisticated-dynamic-campaign single-player-oriented game.
It’s not, strictly-speaking, a sea-based game, but https://store.steampowered.com/app/887570/NEBULOUS_Fleet_Command/ is a sci-fi space-based fleet warfare game. A lot of the elements that you might want in a sea-based fleet naval warfare game are there, sensors, electronic warfare, weapons and countermeasures and such.
I think that those are the sea- or sea-associated games that I’d probably most recommend, myself.
Naval action for slow wooden ships in the Bahamas.
I haven’t seen this prior to now. The idea of a nice age-of-sail combat game sounds interesting, but…man, looking at the Steam description there has some surprises:
That is an appallingly low Steam rating.
It looks like the split is between players who think that the game is too-slow-paced and those who are fine with that, so I could see someone who wants a slow game being into it.
Jesus Christ, the DLC prices. They’re selling each additional ship for ~$50? Like, the game with all ships is ~$700? I mean, I know that DCS World and Il-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad use that model, but I can’t imagine that the ships function as differently from ship-to-ship as the combat aircraft in those games, bring as much additional gameplay.
There’s a lot more ships than the DLC ships. But yes, it’s almost inevitable you will end up buying a couple of them, because the DLCs let you spawn a ship for free every day.
In fairness, I didn’t notice that the game was F2P, no entry fee, so they have to get money from somewhere.
I’ve just broken my left collarbone and for the next couple weeks have left arm in a sling. Thinking about games that are played just with the right hand?...
No Mercy included “incest,” “blackmail,” and “unavoidable non-consensual sex,” according to its Steam page, which also promised players the opportunity to become “every woman’s worst nightmare” and “never take ‘no’ for an answer.”
This doesn’t bode well for Pale Carnations making it onto Steam.
Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s...
I don’t think that Half Life was all that influential. It was a successful game, had a story at a time when FPSes tended to barely bother. But I think that it was less that it was very innovative and more that it competently executed on mechanics and technology that already existed.
Minecraft
I don’t know if I can agree. Yes, it was successful and a sandbox game, but (a) Terraria, for example, came out earlier, and I don’t feel like it was that transformative. It certainly inspired some sandbox games, but I don’t think that this was really an incredibly broad shift.
The Sims
This one brought a lot of new mechanics, but I don’t know about influential. There wasn’t really a large Sims-like genre that it inspired.
Baldur’s Gate 3
It a 2023 release. How can it be influential? Hasn’t even been time for a generation of games influenced by it to come out.
A point made by HP’s SVP and Division President of Gaming Solutions Josephine Tan when talking to XDA Developers, Tan mentioned “If you look at Windows, I struggle with the experience myself. If I don’t like it, I don’t know how to do a product for it.”. Tan continued “If I’m buying a handheld, I want a very simple setup. The minute I turn on my handheld, it will remember the last game I played. In the Windows environment, it doesn’t”.
Okay, I’m not saying that HP shouldn’t do a SteamOS handheld, but…this seems like such a bad rationale. Surely, surely it is possible to write a relatively-trivial piece of software for Windows that simply remembers the last game played? Especially if we’re just talking stuff running out of Steam?
I tried playing Harvest Moon on the SNES today and having played Stardew Valley for hours, I thought I'd try and see how tolerable the original Harvest Moon was in comparison. I know and understand it is unfair because there's a 20 year gap between Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, while also discrediting Harvest Moon's later...
We’re losing the next generation to TikTok. The competition for gaming isn’t Xbox and Nintendo. It’s everything else in the freaking zeitgeist that can take your time away from your gaming activity.
7.1% of the total hours spent were on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2
6.4% were in League of Legends
6.2% were in Roblox
5.8% were in Dota 2
5.4% were in Fortnite
That is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
Realmz was out about the same time as Spiderweb Software’s games (Exile series, later re-released as Avernum series). Both were popular RPGs for the Macintosh (though I believe both had Windows releases as well).
While I did play and enjoy Realmz back in the day, I personally preferred the Spiderweb Software games. More complicated interaction with the world, and I preferred the writing. Less-pretty, though the Avernum re-release was isometric and had new graphics. Have you ever tried them?
I don’t know if I can recommend them in 2025, but if you’re still enjoying Realmz, I figure that the Spiderweb Software stuff might also be something of interest.
EDIT: The current Steam sale, which runs for another two days, appears to have a bundle of all of their games on sale for 60% off. I didn’t personally enjoy the Geneforge series as much as the Exile/Avernum series, and the Avadon series is considerably simpler, and didn’t really grab me. But a lot of the games are also on sale individually, so…shrugs
EDIT2: It looks like Realmz has not seen a Steam release; thought I’d check to see if it was on Steam too.
I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of “how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?”
I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.
But the thing is, if it’s a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I’ve played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead — well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money — and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.
You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it’d still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I’ve played, because I’ve spent so many hours in the thing.
If people are playing these like crazy, you’d think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just…doesn’t matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.
Yeah, Dwarf Fortress too, but at least Dwarf Fortress has an extensive, well-documented wiki. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead had a not-very-up-to-date wiki at one point, but then whoever maintained it had it go down at some point in the past year, and I’d say that the game has also been constantly updated and more-dramatically-rebalanced than Dwarf Fortress, so learning to how to play involves scouring Reddit, YouTube, and Discord to try to figure out what information is current. I think that the current recommended route on the subreddit to learn how to play is to watch recent YouTube videos of some streamers playing, which is…kinda nuts. It’s not uncommon that a question on the subreddit as to an authoritative answer on game mechanics is “go check the code”…
There are also some military sims I’ve played that are probably reasonably approachable to players who are familiar with the military hardware involved from prior to the game, but for players who aren’t, they’re probably in for a lot of reading and understanding mechanics, and some milsims don’t bother to document that, so you really need to do outside reading beyond whatever the game documentation has.
Hah! I didn’t know this. Back when Jeff Vogel — the Spiderweb Software guy — was just starting out, Fantasoft, the company that did Realmz, published the first three Exile games too.
goes through the rest of the list
I don’t think that anything else they published were RPGs, though I’ve played some of the non-RPG games.
It looks like there were also a bunch of scenarios released for Realmz. I’m trying to remember…I definitely remember playing City of Bywater. I don’t know if I’ve played the other scenarios, though.
If you haven’t played them and can round them up, might be that you’ve only played about a fraction of the content out for Realmz, if what you’re after is Realmz-like stuff. :-)
While new scenarios were released throughout the game’s history, also typically packed along with the game in the next Realmz release, the game ultimately ended up with 13 official scenarios:
City Of Bywater (developed alongside Realmz by Tim Phillips)
I’ve definitely played City of Bywater.
Prelude To Pestilence (1995, Sean Sayrs)
Assault On Giant Mountain (1995, Tim Phillips)
Castle in The Clouds (1995, Jim Foley)
I seem to recall the above names, though I don’t remember the scenario content, if I did play them. Nothing after this rings a bell at all.
Destroy The Necronomicon (1995, Tim Phillips)
White Dragon (1996, Jim Foley)
Grilochs Revenge (1997, Sean Sayrs)
Twin Sands of Time (1999, Sean Sayrs)
Trouble in the Sword Lands (1999, Pierre H. Vachon)
Mithril Vault (1999, Tim Phillips)
Half Truth (2000, Nicholas T. Tyacke)
War in the Sword Lands (2000, Pierre H. Vachon)
Wrath of the Mind Lords (2002, Pierre H. Vachon)
EDIT: There’s also apparently a pretty-inactive Realmz subreddit at /r/Realmz. No GOG Realmz release either, though. Some abandonware sites appear to have it.
I’m stretching my memory too far. I remember the City of Bywater world map, but I can’t even remember the world maps for the other scenarios, if I indeed played them.
This abandonware site appears to have a Windows release:
I have no idea what scenarios might be included, and I’m always a little leery about running binaries from random sites outside of a VM — abandonware can be a vector for malware — so I don’t know if I should recommend using it, but it’s there. There are serial numbers to activate what looks like all the listed scenarios in a comment there, so maybe it comes with all of them.
The company appears to have been defunct for the past 20 years, so I suspect that there isn’t going to be any legitimate re-release.
Further down in the thread, I ran into someone talking about an older RPG, Realmz. I dug up a subreddit on Reddit related to the game, and the stickied post had this gem:
These are codes that were reissued by Skip (Aka. SpoonLard). He and my grandfather were the original two collaborators when Skip attempted to carbonize Realmz in 2005.
Nothing like a comment about someone’s grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you’ve played in its original form.
I like the game (as well as the similar https://store.steampowered.com/app/211820/Starbound/) but every time I play it, I wish that it had more ability to create stuff that does things. Like, more Noita-style interactions with the world or Factorio-style automation. The stuff you can make is mostly static.
Old games were also typically steaming piles of shit. It’s just that the ones people still remember are the worthwhile ones, because the bad ones have gone into the dustbin of history.
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not.
There were so many bad platformers for the Super Nintendo, but nobody is ever going to go back and play those or dredge them up.
!patientgamers might be of interest, if you don’t follow it.
But yeah…there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
There have been wikis, guides, and sometimes mods created.
The games that people are still playing are the ones that have stood the test of time, so it’s kinda easy to pick out good ones.
If a 3D game supports a higher framerate — and many don’t, due to things like physics running at a fixed frequency — on modern, high-refresh-rate monitors, 3D games can be pleasantly smooth.
There are some downsides, though:
With multiplayer-oriented games, the community can have moved on, rendering the game not very playable.
The game may not leverage your hardware very well. You may have an 86 bazillion core processor, and especially older games are likely to be using one of them. I have a couple of games I like, like Oxygen Not Included, that really don’t use multiple cores well…and I’d guess that a similar game released in 2025 likely would.
Much as I like C:DDA, it does not perform terribly well battery-wise relative to what it should and looks like it should use. The game re-renders frames even without keypresses, and on top of that, each frame displayed recomputes the world state.
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less.
Just to comment further, if you’re not a big fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 (or the Paths of Exile series, to name another popular modern RPG) for that reason, I wouldn’t recommend the Avadon series in the Spiderweb Software bundle, as it has the same sort of streamlined “move you through the world to the right places” thing. The Exile/Avernum series has the Realmz-style “go wherever and stumble onto stuff” model that you’re referring to.
Kind of reminds me of the difference between Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. Like, both are…technically open world games, but there’s very little reason to ever backtrack in The Outer Worlds, and not much placed content to stumble on outside of cities, whereas in Fallout: New Vegas, I’m running all over the place and running into all sorts of stuff, without having the game really drive me in one direction.
Are you familiar with the A Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it’s a way to add some new life to the thing.
I’d kind of like to see someone review retro games on a “equal standing” with current games. That is, sure, they’re using old technology, sure, but see how they stand up to current games in terms of what you pay and the time investment in playing them.
While I remember having fun with Chrono Trigger, I don’t know if, in 2025, I’d recommend it or any older RPG to someone who has never played them. By the standards of its time, it wasn’t very grindy, but speaking broadly, older RPGs have a lot of repetitive combat.
On the other hand, a lot of, say, older shmups are, I think, still competitive. I don’t feel like the genre has changed as much (though I’ll concede that I haven’t spent a lot of time on modern shmups). So I’d probably be more-inclined to recommend an older shmup, even though I’d say that Chrono Trigger was probably, in its time, a better Super Nintendo game than any Super Nintendo shmup.
EDIT: For an extreme example, I think I first played Tetris on a Game Boy around 1990. I think that that’s probably still about on-par with the 2018 Tetris Effect: Connected with a VR headset. The thirty intervening years haven’t really seen that much change in the fundamentals of falling-block games.
Unfortunately, I have to take down this project. The team at Playstack reached out to me in a very polite and professional manner, requesting its removal, and I fully respect their wishes.
So, to expand on that, at least in US law (and I’d assume elsewhere), if you let people use your trademark for other products and don’t legally challenge it, the trademark can become genericized, which means that you lose the exclusive right to use it.
I don’t know if that was the concern here, but generally, it’s true that there’s an obligation on trademark holders to actively defend their trademarks or lose them.
Those are all mature systems, and I’d say that rankings for games on old systems are reasonably consensus at this point. You can just search for “best system whatever games” and get lists, look for games in genres you like; I’ve had luck doing that in the past, as that avoids a lot of the chaff.
I personally probably have gone back and played Super Metroid the most on the SNES, but depends on what one likes. If you like RPGs from that era, different set of games.
For the early titles listed, when the games came out, Linux was pretty irrelevant from a gaming standpoint.
Later, many games that had cross-platform releases used engines that provided cross-platform compatibility. Those games would have been written to the platform, so I’m sure that ports weren’t as easy.
Now, the games are very elderly. The original team will be long gone. I don’t know if there’s anyone working on those at all – unless a game represents some kind of continued revenue stream, there isn’t a lot of reason to keep engineers on a game.
WINE runs them fine, so there’s a limited return for Blizzard to do a native port. In fact, as I recall, Starcraft was one of the first notable games that WINE ran…I remember Starcraft support being a big deal around 2001, IIRC. The original Warcraft was for DOS, so you can run that in a DOS emulator.
I doubt that the investment in a Linux-native port in 2025 is going to get much of a return relative to what other things one could do with the same resources.
I guess maybe I could see an argument for World of Warcraft, as a very successful, long-running MMORPG that still has players and still represents revenue. But I think that I’d be surprised to see native ports of most of their earlier library.
I didn’t hate it, but it just wasn’t Fallout: New Vegas, and I walked away a little disappointed after hoping for a new Fallout-like game.
Some of the major elements from Fallout just weren’t there:
Fallout provided neat perks/traits that substantially-impacted how one played; that’s a signature part of the series. The great bulk of the perks in The Outer Worlds were things like small percentage increases. They didn’t have a significant impact on how the game played out.
The weapons didn’t “feel” very different other than across classes, with the exception of the “science weapons”, so there wasn’t a lot of variety in gunplay over the course of a game.
While the world was open in that one could technically always backtrack, there wasn’t much reason to do so.
Most of the content was in “cities”. Yeah, sure, there was wilderness, and maybe that added a sense of scale, but it was mostly just filler between cities. If you’re wandering around in Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 4, there was interesting content all over to just stumble into. One only really got that in cities.
Not a lot by way of meaningful, world-affecting decisions. Okay, you can also criticize Fallout 4 on these grounds, but if you were hoping for a Fallout: New Vegas…
There were some things that I did like. In particular:
It was pretty stable and bug-free. The Fallout series has had entrants from a number of teams, but one consistent element has been a lot of bugs at release.
Video game genre communities on the Threadiverse angielski
List more in the comments! I’ll add them if they are a community for a video game genre, and have had at least one post in the last month. Crossposted to !communitypromo here....
What's a cancelled game you really miss? angielski
What is the best Sea based game out there in your opinion? angielski
I'm talking about things like:...
Suggestions for mouse only games? angielski
I’ve just broken my left collarbone and for the next couple weeks have left arm in a sling. Thinking about games that are played just with the right hand?...
Developer of 'non-consensual sex' game withdraws it from Steam after bans in the UK, Canada, and Australia (www.pcgamer.com)
I really need these games ported to Steam. What do y'all have on your lists? angielski
I'm currently scraping the Steam barrel and I could really use these ports:...
The most influential video game of all time - Bafta (www.bafta.org) angielski
Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s...
HP are interested in making a SteamOS handheld as the Windows experience sucks (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Assassin’s Creed Shadows devs roast Elon Musk amid feud with Hasan (www.dexerto.com) angielski
What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists? angielski
I tried playing Harvest Moon on the SNES today and having played Stardew Valley for hours, I thought I'd try and see how tolerable the original Harvest Moon was in comparison. I know and understand it is unfair because there's a 20 year gap between Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, while also discrediting Harvest Moon's later...
"There comes a time when we all declare the war is over": Former PlayStation Studios boss Shawn Layden on the future of video game consoles (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Most of the article is on AAA development as a whole but I found it interesting the comments about consoles in general.
PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Chrono Trigger Is Timeless (www.dcgameblog.com) angielski
BALATRO WIP for the C64 (aka 8-bit Balatro) (ko-ko74.itch.io) angielski
Demo...
need retro game recommendations
So, I want to use my handheld for more than a music player. Need recommendations for systems to to gen 4 + GBA...
Xbox Sales Hit Rock Bottom After Historic 2024 Decline (9meters.com) angielski